The pause button was hit on the Korean War 64 years ago Thursday. Its legacy of destruction lives on. In just three years, the war claimed the lives of millions of people and forever changed the Korean Peninsula. "We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too," said former US Air Force commander Gen. Curtis LeMay in 1988, during an interview for an Air Force military history volume.
By the time the armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, North Korea -- which began the war with a population of 9.6 million -- had suffered an estimated 1.3 million civilian and military casualties, according to figures cited by the US Air Force. South Korea, meanwhile, suffered up to 3 million civilian and 225,000 military casualties, from a total population of around 20.2 million in 1950.
